However, small-scale piracy is not uncommon in North America. There are many forms of piracy that occur. The simplest form of piracy is something that all of us have most likely done at one time or another. The form of piracy I am referring about is lending your copy of a music CD or game to a friend, and making a copy of it for themselves. Since that copy is not intended as a backup, it is a violation of copyright law. The same goes for copying a game; it is only legal if you are making a copy for yourself, to use as a backup.
When people want to hear a new song, they usually do not wait until they hear it on the radio. Since the internet is now a popular medium, they have good reason not to. Now, all one has to do is open up one of many file sharing programs, type in what they want, and within minutes, a CD-quality version of the song is downloaded to the user's computer.
The pure convenience of this practice has caused people to start pirating music. No longer does one have to go to the record store, pay $20 for an artist's CD, and listen to maybe one or two good songs while the rest of the album is filler. The money saved can be used to buy blank CDs and a CD burner, to burn a compilation of the songs one wants, in an order of their own choice.
Ironically, the practice of using a file sharing program to download all the latest songs by a large population only occurred because of a musical group that was vocal about the piracy of their songs on one of the first file sharing applications. That group was Metallica, who was angered when they found out that their music was being pirated on the file sharing network, Napster, which prompted them to file a lawsuit against it. (Jones) Once the headlines were made, the once underground file sharing program became national news. The news about "free music" caused lots of people to download the program onto their own computer, and start getting their own pirated music.
